Technology Marketing in the Digital Age: Sharing is Caring: How to Amplify your Marketing Efforts

It’s a simple fact: companies that communicate their marketing activities to their stakeholders, and include them in various marketing efforts will see better results with more business opportunities

You can have the most robust marketing plan in place, but without engagement and amplification, your efforts may not get the return you had hoped for. 

So, what does it take to drive engagement? First and foremost, give your employees and partners a sense of ownership. With a clear understanding, and feeling of involvement, they’ll not only help make the efforts more successful by sharing, but will also understand at a more intrinsic level that a good marketing strategy exists to help them perform their jobs better. 

Here are some ways you can leverage the sharing power of your people:

Event Marketing: Hosting an event? Assign a champion. Sure you’ll throw resources at the event (i.e. time, budget, etc.), but your sales people should have skin in the game to make it highly effective. Drive ownership and accountability by setting a goal for attendance and incentivizing every employee to share the invitation with any appropriate parties. Remember to send an invite to your business partners and ask them to post it on your behalf as well.

Social Media: If you’re taking the time to create and post valued IT expert content to social media sites, make sure it’s easy to share. There are many amplification tools out there that allow for sharing with ease, so all an employee or partner just needs to do is log in and, voila… company content will automatically be posted to their own sites. With this, posts are exponentially multiplied, as are impressions. Some of the tools we like are GaggleAmp and PointBurst.

Email Marketing: Kathy Dunlay, a B2B technology marketer who’s completed more than 800 successful email/telemarketing campaigns in her marketing career, says “Email as a component of a campaign continues to be just as critical and relevant in 2015 as it was in 2000.” But here’s where employees come into play: Though you may have a database you’re already sending to, your employees and team members may also have a list of contacts of prospects and customers you could leverage. Give your email more legs and suggest they send out your content through their own individual hand signed emails.

PR Efforts: Have you written and sent a press release to the news wire lately? If so, did you inform your employees? Oftentimes, employees and partners of your organization are the last to know. But this is an easy fix. Simply create a repeatable press communication email for employees that inform them each time you send out a release. Don’t forget to include the URL for the release, especially if you have it on a newswire or on your website. Encourage them to share the news link with their contacts as well. It creates instant amplification.

Industry-relevant Content: Maybe your company is creating content that adds value to your industry (i.e. videos, blogs, e-briefs). Make sure you announce that internally. If you have an internal company portal, house them there. Or post material to a website with a link to downloadable content. Don’t stop at the first communication because it can easily be overlooked the first time. Send out regular reminders to your employees/team members about new content, and make it easy for them to post with links and content descriptions.

The value of any marketing activity lies in how much you can get your stakeholders to be involved and share it. Ramp up your communications efforts and see how fast you can get more reach.